The Nuclear Now movie I mentioned in a previous post highlighted...

The Nuclear Now movie I mentioned in a previous post highlighted the massive disinformation disseminated by oil and gas against nuclear. I see a US county is now suing them for knowingly selling their products when they knew the harm it caused. A bit like the tobacco industry. Whilst not directly related to the nuclear thread, it shows the tide continues to turn

disallowed/environment/climate-change/inside-the-new-climate-assault-on-the-oil-majors-20231123-p5embw.html

Insidethe new climate assault on the oil majors

ByNick O'Malley

November 25, 2023 — 6.00am

The infernal heat that begankilling people in the normally temperate north-west of the United States inJune 2021 began with unusually heavy rain over China, which drove energy intothe jet stream which crosses the Pacific and set off a cascading set ofclimatic events resulting in a heat dome that settled across parts of the USand Canada.

In Multnomah County, Oregon,temperatures reached 42 degrees Celsius, 44.5 degrees and 46.6 degrees oversuccessive days. Before that week began, the county’s record temperature was41.6 degrees, and its average high temperature was just 21 degrees.

By the time it subsided theheat had killed 69 people. At the time an event like it was inconceivable. Butdue to rapid global warming, it is now predicted similar heatwaves will strikethe region once a decade or so.

Obviously, the heat dome hiton a broader front. Canada’s hottest-ever temperature of 49 degrees wasrecorded in the village of Lytton, British Columbia. Fires broke out on June30, killing two. Across Canada 1000 deaths were attributed to the heat. Records were shattered as far south as Palm Springs outside Los Angeles.

But it is Multnomah Countythat has decided on a course of action that might have consequences around theworld. The county is suing the global fossil fuel industry for US$50 billion($76.2 billion) to cover costs of the heat dome and for future-proofing thecounty. It is accusing defendants, including ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, theAmerican Petroleum Institute, Koch Industries and the consulting firm McKinsey& Co, of executing “a scheme to rapaciously sell fossil fuel products anddeceptively promote them as harmless to the environment, while they knew thatcarbon pollution emitted by their products into the atmosphere would likelycause deadly extreme heat events like that which devastated Multnomah County inlate June and early July 2021.”

Climate litigation isincreasing around the world, but the Multnomah case is attracting significantattention.

Partly this has to do withthe lawyers saddling up to take on the oil majors, says Professor DouglasKysar, a specialist in torts law and climate change at Yale University. In thepast, in the US, the so-called oil majors cases have often been led an activistlawyer called Vic Sher and the firm he founded, Sher Edling, an effectiveboutique outfit dedicated to the climate fight.

But this case is being run by three largeplaintiff firms and led by one from Texas, “which you know, for us, it’s likeSaudi Arabia, it’s ground zero for the oil industry,” says Kysar.

That firm is SimonGreenstone Panatier, founded by Jeffrey Greenstone, who recently helped thestate of Texas extract US$1.9 billion from big pharmaceutical firms over theirrole in the US opioid abuse crisis.

The shift is significant,says Kysar, because it suggests mainstream firms now see profitable avenues toattack the fossil majors that once did not exist. In part this is due to theintensity of extreme weather events, and in part it is due improvements in whatis known as “attribution science” - scientific research linking individualextreme weather events to climate change. But it is also because taking on ofthe world’s biggest industries is expensive, and now that these firms arecashed-up from prior successes, they have war chests with which to fight.

Greenstone argues the caseis clear and strong.

“This was not a naturalweather event, it is not one of those mysteries of God’s will,” he told thismasthead.

“In the aftermath of thiscatastrophe, several scientific studies were conducted having nothing to dowith litigation by some of the leading climate scientists in the world, and allof them reached the same conclusion.

“This heat dome was causedby fossil fuel pollution that superheated the Earth’s surface, dried out theregion’s soil and intensified a high-pressure system to turn this county into aconvection oven.

“We contend that thiscatastrophe was not caused by an act of God, but rather by several of thelargest energy companies in the world playing God with the lives of innocentand vulnerable people by selling as much oil, gas and coal as they could whilelying.”

“Excellent scientists withinExxon modelled and predicted global warming with, frankly, shocking skill andaccuracy”

Geoffrey Suprane, Harvard.

This statement is worthunpacking. Multnomah County is claiming two things here. Firstly, that asextreme weather events intensify, the scientific methods used to link them toclimate change are improving. Kysar agrees – so-called “attribution science” isbecoming central to climate litigation, he says.

The second is the claim thatfossil fuel companies knew this would happen and lied about it. This claim toois become more common in these suits.

In January this year, in apaper called “Assessing ExxonMobil’s Global Warming Projections,” researchersfrom Harvard and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact demonstrated that thecompany’s scientists accurately predicted climate change decades ago.

“What we found is thatbetween 1977 and 2003, excellent scientists within Exxon modelled and predictedglobal warming with, frankly, shocking skill and accuracy only for the companyto then spend the next couple of decades denying that very climate science,”Geoffrey Supran, lead author and former research fellow in the history ofScience at Harvard told the Harvard Gazette.

Sher Edling has been able to construct atimeline going back to 1958, using external and internal documents, to show howsophisticated oil companies’ knowledge of climate change was, and theindustry’s efforts to downplay the threat.

ExxonMobil did not respondto request for comment for this story.

In September, the state ofCalifornia launched a suit against five companies - ExxonMobil, Shell, BP,ConocoPhillips and Chevron - claiming they deliberately mislead the publicabout the dangers of their products.

In a statement to the New York Times, Ryan Meyers, general counsel of the American Petroleum Institute, said: “This ongoing, coordinated campaign to wage meritless, politicised lawsuits against a foundational American industry and its workers is nothing more than a distraction from important national conversations and an enormous waste of California taxpayer resources. Climate policy is for Congress to debate and decide, not the court system.”

California’s governor GavinNewsom said: “These folks had this information and lied to us, and we couldhave staved off some of the most significant consequences. It’s shameful. It’ssickens you to your core.”

How these cases will playout is not yet clear, but in April, some of the jurisdictions bringing them hada win when the US Supreme Court ruled that they should remain in state courts,where they are thought to have more chance of success than in federal courts.

Kysar says the companies aredrafting an “army” of lawyers to fight every case in every jurisdiction aroundthe word because “every one of them feels like an existential threat” to theindustry.

In Ango-American politicalsystems, governments are constrained from taking overarching action, he says.The trade-off is that when people are injured, courts can intervene.

“That means when there’ssome big social harm that’s not being addressed, people turn to the courts, andthe courts have to give an answer.

“You could call your MP 100times a day and say ‘I’m worried about climate’, they might never call youback.”